THE LAKE'S WATER IS NEVER SWEET, apt title for people who can't catch a break

THE LAKE'S WATER IS NEVER SWEET
GIULIA CAMINITO (tr. Hope Campbell Gustafson)
Spiegel & Grau (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In her English-language debut, award-winning Italian novelist Giulia Caminito follows a teenage girl as her family transitions from Rome’s impoverished outskirts to a fraught new beginning in a tranquil lakeside town, capturing the disillusionment, loneliness, and rage that defined a generation.

In the 1990s, Gaia’s family moves from the neglected peripheries of Rome to an idyllic lakeside town twenty miles away, in search of a new life that will lift them out of poverty. Each of them bears their own scars: Gaia’s strong-willed mother is fiercely determined to secure a better future for her children at any cost; her father, a once proud man, now suffers in bitter silence after a devastating accident; her anarchist older brother rebels against the political apathy he sees at home; and her young twin brothers wordlessly bear witness to a family in decay.

When Gaia meets two local girls, Agata and Carlotta, the trio builds a fragile friendship throughout their adolescence based as much on their insecurities and jealousies as it is on their mutual affection. Gaia’s encounters with callous boys and contemptuous teachers convince her that she might always be an outsider—excluded from a privileged life and perhaps even beyond the possibility of happiness. Faced with bullying and betrayals among her peers and immense pressure from her mother to excel, Gaia turns inward and her world becomes increasingly insular. Then tragedy strikes her friend group. As more friends slip away and her family fractures, Gaia vows to make the world pay for all the things it has denied her.

Winner of the Campiello Prize, The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet is an unflinching portrait of a generation, striving to make a place for themselves in a world markedly different from the one their parents promised them. With psychological acuity and stylish prose, Caminito takes us into the volatile, searching mind of a young woman torn between her desire to connect with others and her drive for self-preservation. In a novel that has been acclaimed by readers around the world, Caminito shows how tenderness and fragility often lie just beneath the surface of simmering fury.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Gaia narrates this story to us, in all her adolescent angst, pain, confusion, bewilderment...all the usual things an adolescent in the middle of the utterly mystifying process of finding out who she is, what she wants, how she's going to set about getting it, feels.

That does not sound like a book I'd like very much. And yet you see those four stars up there. Where'd they come from?

From a scaffolding that wasn't safe. From a stable that showed Gaia she didn't have the power to heal the wounds betrayal leaves. From a bag of rotting lemons, from a carnival shooting game, from texts that can't be answered...from, in other words, life as it is lived.

Watching in real-time someone coming of age is *maddening* because you're helpless. Reading a novel about a young woman becoming herself is both faster and friendlier on the patience. Gaia's got a hard row to hoe in this life, her entire family's very badly broken in real, honest ways. That leaves her to do what she can with what she's got, and that is never enough. Nothing is ever enough when you're working on, working out, yourself. You paste together the bits you can find, then paper over the holes and cracks and voids. It is how humans have always done it, don't be fooled by fools telling you it used to be easier, it was better when..."when" is the slipperiest word in English. "When" never comes, never came, isn't coming, got lost. "When" immigrated from Old Frisia, from Proto-Indo-Europe whatever wherever whenever that happened. Who needs "when" because we have "now."

And "now" is Gaia's native land.

It was clear to me the story here was not purely foundationally fiction. The author says so in her last word on the subject. She's Gaia; other girls from her past were Iris and Agata. It doesn't help, particularly, to know that but it does make me trust the author more. She's honest; she wrote a novel about realness by using reality, and one person's reality is never, ever enough...see above...for a whole novel. It's too much and never enough, like Mary Trump says. We're not enough for fiction; we're too much for Life. It's a puzzlement, remember Yul Brynner talking those lines on pitch? And no king like The King and I ever spoke greater sooth. Imagine not feeling puzzled! Imagine feeling so sure of yourself that you, a teen anarchist boy, run your family! Imagine how *little* you feel in the face of Life, and you power through anyway, and rotten-souled bastards take your life, your living, your family's home.

Imagine.

And yet here we are. Absolutely in the same place we were, only without instead of with.

Read The Lake's Water Is Never Sweet by Giulia Caminito as translated by Hope Campbell Gustafson and imagine.